Netflix’s newest rom-com arrived this week with a premise that is equal parts tender and absurd, and somehow pulls both off. Voicemails for Isabelle, now streaming, centers on Jill, a rising chef still processing the loss of her sister Isabelle. Her way of coping is to keep calling Isabelle’s phone number, leaving the kind of unfiltered, oversharing voicemails she would have left when her sister was alive.

The complication arrives when Isabelle’s number gets reassigned. The new owner is Wes, a real estate agent with an understated charm who starts listening to the messages and, slowly, falls for the woman leaving them. He knows her through her voicemails before he ever meets her face to face, and that premise gives the film an emotional texture that separates it from the standard will-they-won’t-they formula.

Writer and director Leah McKendrick built the project around her leads, and the casting shows.

Why Deutch was the only choice for this role

Zoey Deutch has spent years demonstrating that she can carry a film on emotional instinct alone. Her previous work includes Set It Up and Nouvelle Vague, and she has shown a consistent ability to make characters feel lived-in rather than written. McKendrick described Deutch’s emotional range as something few performers can match, pointing specifically to her capacity to move across tones without losing the audience along the way.

As Jill, Deutch plays someone whose humor and warmth are inseparable from her grief, which is a difficult balance to sustain across an entire film. The role asks her to be funny, broken, and magnetic at the same time, and the early response to the film suggests she delivers on all three.

Nick Robinson brings old-school charm to a new story

Nick Robinson, who previously starred in Love, Simon and the Netflix series Maid, brings a quieter energy to Voicemails for Isabelle that works well against Deutch’s more expressive performance. His portrayal of Wes draws on a brand of romantic leading-man appeal that feels genuinely rooted in earlier decades of the genre, the kind of effortless sincerity that defined ’90s rom-coms, updated for a contemporary audience.

McKendrick credited Robinson’s smile as a specific asset on set, noting that it has the effect of making audiences willing to follow the character anywhere. The chemistry between Robinson and Deutch is built slowly through the film’s structure rather than through conventional meet-cute mechanics, which gives their eventual connection more weight.

A supporting cast that earns every scene

The ensemble around Deutch and Robinson is stacked in the best way. Nick Offerman plays Jill’s boss, described as full of hot air, in a role that sounds precisely tailored to his comedic strengths. Lukas Gage appears as a regrettable one-night stand, a part that sounds brief but memorable. Harry Shum Jr. takes on the role of Wes’s closest friend, bringing the kind of grounded loyalty that makes a romantic lead more believable as a whole person.

Ciara Bravo plays Isabelle in what is presumably a series of flashbacks, and McKendrick herself appears on screen in a triple-threat capacity as writer, director, and cast member.

McKendrick noted that keeping Gage and Deutch focused on set required effort. The two apparently made each other laugh to the point of losing entire takes, which is either a production challenge or a strong indicator of the energy the film carries.

Voicemails for Isabelle is the kind of project that arrives knowing exactly what it wants to be. It is not trying to reinvent the genre. It is trying to remind audiences why the genre worked in the first place, and it has assembled exactly the right people to make that argument.